


across the universe

by saraheli



Category: SF9 (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Doctor Who Fusion, Angst, F/M, Timelord Inseong
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 11:39:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14789820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saraheli/pseuds/saraheli
Summary: What would you say if I told you that someone was looking for you? You might ask why or who it was, but all I would be able to tell you is that they’ve been looking for as long as you’ve been alive, maybe even longer, because you are the only thing in this wide, wide universe that will make him smile again.





	1. prologue

You led a normal life. You worked a desk job for a publishing company and had lunch with your coworkers every day. You called your parents once a week and kept a cat hidden from your landlord in your apartment. This normalcy had been carefully constructed over years of meticulous planning on your part, after all, you couldn’t live your life in the shadowed rut of your past, could you?

They were back. The nightmares. They hadn’t bothered you much lately, not for years, in fact, but now they were worse than ever. In your youth, they had done little more than wake you with an alarmed yelp or even a near-silent intake of breath as you pushed the sheets from your body. Regardless, they hadn’t made you lose sleep and they certainly had not haunted you long into the day, either.

These dreams, even when you were a little kid, had never been of monsters or tragedy or death, but something much more unsettling. Every night was precisely the same down to the last detail, and you were certain that they would have been flashbulb vivid if there were images to recall aside from merely feelings and voices.

You sat in complete emptiness. No structure could be noted as far as you could see in any direction, and you could feel the darkness fondling you with its cold hands as if it were some disgusting man behind a bar. Despite being nothing more than an extension of the nothingness that surrounded you, its touch was alarmingly solid against every part of you, as if space itself compressed against your skin with the intention of bruising it.

After a few moments, the voice of a man, unrecognizable to you, would sobbingly beg your forgiveness from somewhere in the blackened abyss before you. Never once had you heard another voice that resembled it, but it wasn’t as if it were particularly strange. He would tell you over and over that he was sorry, that he should never have left you behind, that you would be together again soon. But, regardless of the sentiment behind such words, that blackness before you would swallow you further and further into its hot stomach with each plea until you woke, kicking and screaming and gasping for breath.

You didn’t know where to turn; your family only lamented that they thought they had gone away, and your friends wouldn’t understand, so you resolved not to talk about them anymore. Surely, they’d pass like before, right?

So, you went about your daily life: wake up from a long night of not sleeping, go to work, come home, and dread sleeping until you had to do it all over again. The rings beneath your eyes deepened with each passing day, and your coworkers began to voice their concerns to you.

You just seem so tired, are you sleeping? Is everything okay? Are you sick?

You didn’t understand how bad things had gotten until your supervisor was forcing you to take time off and you were suddenly heading back home before noon.

Your apartment looked different during the day. You rarely saw it with sunlight flitting through the blinds and your cat laying quietly in the warmed spot on the couch. It hummed with morning silence and, after dropping your bag by the door, you curled up beside your couch and fell asleep. 

* * *

_You stood before a fountain. It was massive and porcelain and filled with the most crystalline of all waters you had ever seen. The liquid was perfectly still; unmoving as if it were disguised as glass. The fountain was built of three tiers, each more grandiosely decorated than the last.  Four uncolored walls enclosed it, the room illuminated only by the brilliant sunlight that poured through an opening in the ceiling._

_Curiously, you circled the fixture, studying it in your confusion and peering into its pools for some indication of how you got here or how you might leave. To your dismay, there was, of course, nothing for you and so you stepped away until your back pressed against the wall behind you which was unsettlingly alive with warmth and movement from whatever lurked on the other side._

_After many moments alone, someone’s arms embraced you from behind, and their touch was, though making you jump in shock, comforting. The world seemed to fall away as you turned to face them, finding familiarity among features of a face you had no conscious memory of._

_“You’re here,” his voice was almost inaudible to you, but the words slit your ears. He had been expecting you or waiting for someone to arrive at the very least._

_“Who…” You whispered, your hand coming up to touch the man’s face gingerly._

_He was beautiful, so beautiful in fact that you thought it impossible to forget him if the two of you had met before. Soft brown hair fluttered over his brow and, just beneath, two perfectly angular chocolatey eyes drank in your features with a longing only a lover could possess. Your fingers traced over the line of his jaw and your eyes moved to study his mouth, his lips turning to a sweet, melancholy smile as he watched you._

_He chuckled, but it was weighted with sadness. His hands pressed delicately against your back as if he were afraid that you would break under his grip, or disappear into the air at any moment._

_“You don’t remember me,” it sounded like it was meant to be a question, but his tone indicated that it was nothing more than a statement of fact, “I suppose I should have expected that, but ouch.” He let out another laugh, “Not even my name? You gave it to me, after all.”_

_That voice. That was the voice from your nightmares. You almost didn’t recognize it coming from between someone’s lips and uttering something other than a tearful plea._

_“I…What?” Your heart was racing, but you could pull yourself away because, despite your heart pumping you full with what should have been panic, your body betrayed you and begged to be closer still with the stranger before you._

_“You said…oh, what was it?” He looked away from you, the light catching his eyes and casting little shadows across his visage. “‘Someone as special as you are should have a real name, it makes you more human’.”_


	2. one

Changing jobs is seldom an easy transition, especially when you’re forced into it because your mother and former boss are “just concerned about your health” despite knowing little to nothing about it. It was an easy barista job at a cafe three blocks from your house that made you feel like you had gone back to being a broke college student, but, at this point, you would take whatever you could get your hands on. **  
**

This was the kind of job that made you forget what faces were supposed to look like or how voices were supposed to sound. Over time, all of them blended together into orders and numbers and swipes of credit cards; thank-yous and not-todays; hellos and goodbyes, but none of them were meant for you. They were meant for everyone who could see them and who would make a snap judgment of them based on this singular fragment of their life.

But you tried to ignore that sentiment and keep your customer-service-smile plastered on your face until your shift ended. You must have been doing a pretty good job because within two weeks you had gotten a promotion. You were the manager of your location and it was now your job to deal with the angry women whose croissants didn’t have cheese and the businessmen whose ties had been stained by a clumsy barista. One day, however, something interrupted you from your new daily grind that jarred you out of whatever gelatinous lethargy had swallowed you.

* * *

“Oh come on, this has to be right,” his eyes searched the screens above him for some kind of reading and he swore in delight when the computer finished its function the way he had expected.

He pulled a couple of levers and sat on the floor, allowing the space around him to jerk as he fixed his necktie and the buttons on his shirt. Any ordinary man would find himself in shambles, but not this one. He was used to being shaken by the wavy fabric of the universe itself, so a little minor turbulence left him almost completely unbothered. In fact, he was covered in it, the fabric of the universe: dark and cold and lonely, but he had to cover it with a smile that matched the brightness of the stars and a skinny tie he had stolen from somewhere he could scarcely picture now, all he knew was that you were the first one to put it around his neck.

He had seeking you from the day he lost you. He had so much to explain, so much to put back, and so much to fix that it sometimes felt like his brain was merely a system of whistles sending a code he had lost the means to decipher.

Now, here he was, landing in a time he had never seen before in hopes of finding you. There had been seemingly endless evidence that you were here, but it was impossible to know where, or when, exactly, so he resolved that, for the time being, he would search this whole town until he found you.

The first night on Earth is always the worst for men like him. It tended to be chaotic and full of new sensations that would make his bones ache in dull waves accompanied by a cocktail of nostalgia and guilt and gin, but of course, you had to land here where gin was a rarity and the only other option was something clear that burned his insides like tears in the throat of a mourner. That fire didn’t matter though so long as it overcast the bile in his nerves and the grief in his stomach, but as he brought the glass to his lips and hissed at the sting, he could only think of you.

_“You know drinking is cowardly, right?”_

_He looked over at you with a knowing smile, his eyes feigning the wryness he wishes he could show._

_You two hadn’t been here at the bar for long. You couldn’t stay anywhere much longer than a day or two anymore, but that never seemed to bother you. The building would now be called reminiscent of another time, but it had scarcely stood for a year or two when you visited. The drinks were cheaper than any you’d ever heard of and the clothes you wore looked like they had been procured from a film set; this was the norm._

_The ceiling was high and dramatic and dripping with crystals that shone brighter than any star, but instead of being backed by the indigo of night, the rouge of velvet caressed them with crimson fingers._

_“And why is that?”_

_He had known your answer then and he knew it now, but things seldom mean much when we tell them to ourselves._

_“You’re just hiding behind that shit,” your voice was smooth, almost blending into the melodic conversations and tinkling of ice cubes inside glasses nearby. “It doesn’t do anything real. If you were anyone else, I’d say that at least you were ruining your liver, but you’re not even doing that.”_

_He laughed at this, nodding into his cup. You were right. You were always right._

_“What would you prefer?”_

_“Well Mr. Melville,” you chuckled and shook your head, “I would prefer to get the hell out of here. They’ll be looking.”_

This was the part of the memory that made him drink. Each and every drink he had brought him back to this night so that he could relive a sparse, chaste touch. Sometimes, when his head wasn’t spinning half as fast from the whirring of his machine or the booze, he could swear that he could feel it.

_Your fingers clasped over his, working the drink from his grasp. You used your other hand to take it away, filling his hand with yours as a replacement. Your skin was as warm as the drink where it settled in his chest, spreading a blush over his palm to match the roses growing behind his cheeks._

_“I know,” he finally replied, clearing the nerves from his throat with a small cough, “Come on then.”_

* * *

The little bell above the door rang as he entered the cafe. His eyes throbbed from the daylight that so brutally assaulted them and his hair was in disarray from the countless times his hands had been carded through it over the course of the previous sleepless night. He needed something to keep him functioning here; Earth was no place for a man like him to be out of sorts. It would be horrendous.

Luckily for him, though, he came upon this little shop not long after the sun rose and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he really should take a look inside at the very least.

Something resonated deep within him then when he saw you. You looked just the same—well, as different as someone could look while still being “just the same” anyway. Your eyes, however, were distinctly unakin to the you of his memory. They were dull and solemn with a bitterness he had never seen before, and their loss of luster broke his heart.

The truth was that this life had torn you to pieces. You were doing your best to regain something you had never known you had lost, but the slick of its skin pulled it from your grasp each time you got close again, so it broke your heart, too.

“How can I help you?”

An instinctual sound of shock floated from someplace in the back of your throat when you met his gaze. It was dark and familiar and it wrapped a film of heat around your heart that made you uneasy. You swallowed hard as you tried to regain your composure, but it was too late; he had noticed.

“Just a large black coffee, please,” he said simply.

“Um, right, of course,” you picked up a cup from beside the register, and, uncapping your pen, asked, “Can I have a name for that please?”

He smiled a little, “Inseong.”


End file.
